The misconception of a conscription law - opinion

ByELIYAHU HADDADNOVEMBER 8, 2026 16:00

The ballots have been counted, the Knesset is deadlocked, and coalition arithmetic has replaced campaign slogans.

One slogan, more than any other, filled this campaign: everyone will be drafted. It was said from podiums and printed on billboards as if a problem that has followed the State of Israel since 1948 could be solved by stating it loudly.

Before the next government writes a conscription law into its coalition agreement, it should understand one thing about the people it is legislating for.

The Jewish people have always valued full-time Torah study above everything else. That dedication has never wavered, and it will not waver now. In past generations, Jews were willing to face death rather than stop learning. The same core value is what will keep yeshiva students learning today, whatever a secular law on army service may say.

A value that has never wavered

Let me be clear: what follows is not an analogy. The State of Israel is not Rome, and those debating a draft law are not persecutors. Many of them are sincere patriots worried about the country's security. I recall this history only to show how deep this value runs.

Antiochus IV made Torah study a capital offense, and the Hasmoneans rose rather than submit. After the Bar Kokhba revolt, Hadrian's Rome did the same. Rabbi Akiva kept teaching in public anyway.

When he was asked whether he feared the government, he answered with a parable: a fox invited the fish to escape the fishermen's nets by coming up onto dry land, and the fish replied that if they were in danger in the water, their source of life, they would surely die out of it.

He said Torah is our water. He was tortured to death for it. Rabbi Haninah Ben-Teradion was burned wrapped in a Torah scroll for the same crime.

The Soviet regime outlawed Torah education outright and sent teachers to the gulag, yet underground chadarim (study rooms) and yeshivas ran in cellars and attics for seventy years.

A people that would not stop learning under threat of death will not stop learning to comply with a secular law about military service.

What has kept us Jewish

This persistence is the reason the Jewish people still exist. When the Second Temple was about to fall, Rabbi Yohanan Ben-Zakai did not ask Vespasian to spare Jerusalem. He asked for "Yavne and its sages." The Temple was destroyed, the land was lost, and the people were scattered, but the beit midrash (study hall) at Yavne kept the nation alive for 2,000 years.

The Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans each had armies far larger than ours, and all of them are gone. Torah study is what kept a scattered people one people, from Baghdad to Vilna and from Fez to Brooklyn.

The Torah itself provides for this. The tribe of Levi was set apart and did not go out to war with the other tribes. The Rambam explains that Levi's role was to serve God and teach His ways to the nation, and he adds that this calling is open to any person "whose spirit moves him" to give himself entirely to it.

Since the partnership of Issachar and Zebulun, the Jewish people have understood that those who learn and those who support them both carry the nation.

David Ben-Gurion understood this. In 1949, with the great yeshivas of Europe in ashes, he exempted about 400 students so that what Adolf Hitler had tried to destroy could be rebuilt. The fact that the number is so much larger today does not mean the arrangement failed. It means the yeshivas were rebuilt.

Not every student, but those who truly learn

Honesty requires saying something the yeshiva world itself acknowledges: full-time learning is not for everyone. The Sages taught that of a thousand who begin to study scripture, only one becomes a teacher of the generation.

Some young men, by their own admission, do not have the drive or temperament to sit and learn from morning to night. For them, serving the country, in frameworks that respect their way of life, is a legitimate and honorable path, and many are already taking it. No one should use a yeshiva as a place to hide.

But taking a genuine matmid, a young man who learns fourteen hours a day, putting him in uniform, and promising him a shiur (lecture) "now and then" is not a compromise. It is a contradiction. Torah learning is not a hobby to fit in between guard duties. Its depth comes from the hours, years, and the total immersion.

Telling a promising doctor that he may practice medicine on weekends would be recognized at once as absurd. Our tradition sees the full-time Torah scholar the same way. To say "You can still learn a little" is to say his calling does not exist.

What a law can and cannot do

Policymakers need to face a practical reality. Whatever text the Knesset passes, and whatever the courts order, no state can arrest an entire sector of its population and imprison it for studying Torah.

Tens of thousands of yeshiva students are of draft age. Israel's military prisons hold a few hundred. Even during the tensest months of this year, arrests reached only into the hundreds, and every wave of detentions sent crowds into the streets and brought the country to a standstill.

The young men in the beit midrash are not acting out of defiance of the state. They are acting out of loyalty to something older than the state, the same loyalty Rabbi Akiva described with his fish in the water.

Faced with a choice between the Talmud and a prison cell, they will choose the prison cell. No sanctions table in a Knesset committee will change a value that generations held onto at the cost of their lives.

A law that cannot be enforced does more than fail. It wears down respect for law itself, turns citizens into criminals on paper, and deepens a rift that our enemies watch with satisfaction.

Beyond the slogan

That is why "everyone will be drafted" was never a policy. It was a campaign line written to please one part of the public and to inflame resentment toward another. It may win applause in a television studio, but it cannot survive contact with reality or with Jewish history.

Those who have been taught to see every yeshiva student as a draft dodger have been led into a misconception, and Israeli society pays the price every time it hears that message again.

The next government has a real choice. It can keep promising what it cannot deliver, or it can build an arrangement that is honest in both directions: one that protects the genuine full-time learner, opens real and respectful paths to service for those who are not suited to the beit midrash, and stops treating Torah study as a crime.

The first course will bring more slogans, more protests, and more division. The second is the only one that has a chance of working.

For 3,000 years, the Jewish people have held full-time Torah study above everything else, and that dedication has never wavered. A Jewish state, of all places, should build its laws around that fact rather than against it.

The writer is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned investment professional specializing in disruptive technologies and financial analysis. He is a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA). 

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